


A VISION OF DARK SECRETS

by cuthbert



Series: The Gratuitous Trans AU Nobody Asked For [2]
Category: Vampire Killer | Castlevania: Bloodlines, 悪魔城ドラキュラ | Castlevania Series
Genre: Alternate Universe - Trans, Canonical Character Death, Coming Out, F/M, Gender Dysphoria, Grief/Mourning, John is the Token Cis Boy now, M/M, Menstruation, Other, POV Second Person, Period Typical Attitudes, Self-Harm, Sex Dysphoria, Suicidal Thoughts, Trans Female Character, Trans Male Character, all over it, and you can't stop me, but also period atypical attitudes, but i suppose the latter tag makes it easier to navigate, i cannot make Dad Lecarde into a transphobic dick no matter what, i miss the "Eric Lecarde/his dead fiancee" tag but oh well, i will put my queer hands all over your neglected IP Konami, neither of them is trans in canon, one is, there's a difference between that and, unfortunately fridged by canon, weird vampire hunter coping mechanisms
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-08
Updated: 2018-09-01
Packaged: 2019-06-23 16:36:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15610449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuthbert/pseuds/cuthbert
Summary: What is a man?That question's 220 years out of date.What is a man?What's yourproblem?What is a man?Sitting on an aqueduct contemplating death....oh dear.(PLEASE NOTE WHAT SERIES THIS IS PART OF.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Your Asshole Dad's Castle Is Back Again](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/404418) by eva problems. 



> Bit more a straight rework of canon backstory than the kind of interpretive offshoot work that piece is, though. And far less optimistic.
> 
> ...I have very mixed, largely negative feelings about going "oh the pretty one must be a trans guy" and yet here we are, I've gone and writ something that'll be seen as that, whoops.
> 
> And I'd apologize for the tumblr tags but I'm exhausted.

You were going to get married under the names your families knew, and then you were going to take the spear and run. John's house is stupid levels of huge because his dad was more Texas than sense, he could have let you two move in. Or, hell, Lord Godalming at least understood you, out of all your father's friends. He might have let you both crash at his townhouse in London.

But then you got greedy. You got Fucking Stupid GOD What The Fuck Were You Thinking greedy, and you took a commission from that Bartley bitch just because she hated Tedious Constantin’s work too, and then another, and another, and by the time you connected her to Gwendolyn’s anemia it was far past too late.

Her family came for her body and you had no claim on it, just the ring you'd given her that was still on her hand. Her father gave it back. He wouldn't even look at you.

John came as soon as he could, and he held you while you screamed and wept, held your hair back when the grief wouldn't let you keep food down. He helped you pack up the studio and move everything back to Segovia, back to your father's house, back to the strangling city walls you'd wanted to escape. The cathedral still crouches over the city like a fat cat satisfied that it can kill anything in reach without too much effort, and you clawed your chest bloody in the bath the first night you were back; there had to be some connection.

John doesn't know you're up here. Oh, he'd come looking eventually, probably. You like high places, and the aqueduct is a landmark everyone knows. He worries about you now, you know that much.

You didn't tell him that you wanted to be alone tonight to set right what wrongs you had allowed to happen. You made sure to make it sound like you just wanted to go for a walk, that you needed some time to yourself, and sure, he looked a little hurt, he’s been painfully obviously trying not to hover too closely at your elbow and he must’ve thought you didn’t think he was trying enough, but you didn’t want him to get tangled up in this. It’s bad enough that he was the one to mention the attacks, that there must be a vampire here. Worse that he’s started making inquiries and sketching out a map. You knew right away what was going on, and you knew it was your fault.

Your problems followed you from Paris. John is right to worry. When you saw Gwendolyn tonight, her hair had been chopped off. She wore a dress, at least, but that was definitely just something Bartley put her in, God knows her family wouldn’t have. She didn’t know you, didn’t beckon to you like Lucy had to Lord Godalming, she just screeched and hissed.

She’d really known you, once. She’d understood the contradiction of you from the moment you first kissed - “A man’s heart in an Amazon’s body,” she’d said. “God, if only we could trade.” You’d laughed, reckless, and kissed her harder at that. You’d been so happy, you’d finally found someone whose wrongness felt right pressed against your own.

And then. And then the war. And then it all really went to hell. You’d lain down your arms to become a sculptor, turned your back on the family trade, and you couldn’t recognize a greater un-dead when she walked up to your table at _Le D_ _ô_ _me_. You were an idiot.

You were an idiot tonight, too, and that’s why your face is bleeding. Your shirt’s probably a total loss, but you can’t bring yourself to care. The bats are yet to return to the aqueduct, though now the moon has set. You don’t know how long it is til morning, and your watch is sitting at home, unwound, stopped at the time that your other soul’s breath did. What was left of her clawed your cheek open. You could heal it, but there’s just no point.

You came up here to die, after all. If you hold the sword close, the point right at the join of your chin and neck, and fall… it won’t matter how you hit, you’ll die pretty much instantly then. You’ve got it out of the scabbard, now, lain across your lap. It’s almost the pose Gwendolyn held at the start and end of that first dance you saw, her “Death of Fujiwara”, though you’re seated at the top edge of the aqueduct instead of kneeling at the edge of a low stage.

That dance - God, she’d been beautiful, even playing at being a man. A steel-blue kimono had swirled around her, fallen enticingly open as she whirled, silently pleading with heathen gods for any choice but the one a disgraced warrior was forced to make, raking her hair down from the harsh topknot it was pinned into. No one had taken photographs. No one had been cranking a camera for a moving picture. She is gone, now, truly gone, every part of her, and there are no images of that night you fell in love. 

And now the choice is yours. The pose fits. You watched your beloved die, and now you have destroyed what remained of her. Elizabeth Bartley escaped, and fuck if you know where to. There is no point in living, even if there’s a loose end you didn’t tie off. John is as good as a Belmont, he’ll be able to take care of things once you -

There’s a little sound like a footstep behind you. You would have heard someone walking, would have heard them climbing up. You know who it is, then. Not many people who can fly know you’ve always hidden up here when you’ve hurt the most. “Tía Elvira,” you say, and you hate how thin and high your voice is. “I know it’s you.”

“Eric, what the _fuck_ ,” she says, plainly taking in you and the sword and the blood you’re covered in all at once. It’s so _her_ to say that in a quiet deadpan voice. So completely her that you can’t do anything except sheathe the sword and bury your face in your hands, because it just had to be her who found you, of course it did.

She’s found you before, of course. She found you when you were sneaking out at night, seeking out fights and monsters to hunt. She gave you her spear, then.

“The Alucard Spear?!”  
  
“What the fuck, they’re _really_ still calling it that? No. Call it… call it the Witches’ Spear, Maria helped me forge the blade and we had to find Sypha’s notes to use for the magical parts.”

She passed you boys’ clothing without saying anything, not even “this might make it easier to fight”. She let you bring it up, or not bring it up, rather, since you didn’t, and she found you sulking up here when you got caught and those clothes got confiscated.

“They’re okay with me having the Spear, I’m the oldest so I’m kind of supposed to, but they don’t want me to keep _fighting_ with it. Even John thinks it’s bullshit! He said he’d send me some of his old clothes, but they’re probably just going to take the package before I get to it, and he’s like a foot taller than me now, and it hurts that he has to keep putting _that name_ on the outside of all the letters he sends me….”

“So… your real name is Eric, right?”

“I - yeah, but how did you know?”

She just smiled, and shook her head so you knew better than to ask, and _God_ she was way too pretty when she let her hair float around like that. Then, a few days later, there was a _suit_ laid out on your bed when you trudged upstairs to throw yourself into it. Black silk with real silver embroidery, short pants and ribbon-tied stockings, like something a torero would wear, and there’d been a note on top of it.

 

_My son -_

_Eric, I have misunderstood you greatly._

_Lady Elvira has explained the matter in more detail than I allowed you to provide. I hope that this gift, at least in part, speaks to the sincerity with which I say that I am sorry for not seeing you before._

 

You dressed in a hurry and _ran_ to the study, you knew your father would be there, he always stayed up late with his guests there, and he ended up introducing you as _yourself_ to three of the Baldwins _and_ the Graves sisters once you’d stopped hugging him.

“Not Isidore, though?” He only asked it much later.  
  
“No. I’m sorry, Papa. It’s Eric. It’s definitely Eric. It just fits.”

You haven’t even let yourself think about your father tonight. With Andrés dead and Silvia married off, and Román gone all the time on business....

“God,” you mumble into your hands. “Oh my god. I almost fucked _everybody_ ’s lives up.”

 Elvira sits down next to you and drapes her cape around your shoulders. “You’re not the one who started a war to try and bring my asshole dad back, kid. I think you're doing okay, next to Liz.”

"She hates that name." You say it automatically, you worked for the woman - the vampire - for long enough.

Elvira laughs, low and sharp. "Yeah. Yeah, I know."

 


	2. THE SINKING OLD SANCTUARY

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I thought this was finished. After reading a certain other trans AU on here, I found more of it to write. 
> 
> So here, have Eric fighting monsters to cope with dysphoria, some gay kissing, and menstruation as a metaphor for... something, possibly a dead lover forgiving what the living sees as infidelity?

Later, historians will argue over whether you were a man or a woman. Later, your daughters will defend your name even as scholars dissect your old letters, call you Isabel in their own, call you a _lesbian_ (and what is that word, that peculiarly specific word? they say they’ve "reclaimed" queer, so why not that?) because Gwendolyn’s family went to ashes along with the name they called her. Later you will die, fifty years old, made of too-skinny whipcord muscle and yet still marred across the taut flesh of your belly by the ragged marks carrying your daughters left. Later you will watch Brauner as he does not strip your corpse but merely leaves it to rot out in a courtyard, and you will thank God for small mercies.

Later.

Later, later, later.

Now, there is nothing but motion. When you are fighting you feel at home in your body, no matter what you are. You are not a man or a woman, you are a weapon, finely honed, the very best of the bloodlines mingled in your veins. Now there is motion and the smell of the sea and the sound of your breathing and John’s own, and ragged curses from both of you. The spear finds flesh, the whip finds flesh, and minotaurs fall.

You are alive and Gwendolyn is dead.

John is dying, and you do not know it.

Later you will wonder if he truly was, right then, when his wounds still healed when you cast spells at them. Later you will know he was, you will know he was dying as soon as he picked the whip back up after awakening its power. Later you will hate yourself for granting that to him, and he will tell you softly to not do that, that he made his choice and he’ll lie in it, and you’ll laugh at the mangled idiom even as you keep crying.

Later.

Later, later.

Now there is water to outrun, a sorcerer raising the tide early. Now, suddenly, your boat’s hasty departure makes sense, and so do the stories about this place pulling itself up out of the sea. The sorcerer is an uncreative idiot in his dodging and between you and John it takes not even a minute to stop the water’s rising. You stop it the bloody way, the hard way, but you cannot care that this anonymous man is dead because he wanted you dead too. John looks sick at having killed a human being, and that bothers you far more. When the water falls, the two of you chase it, down and down and down. You aren’t paralyzed when the Medusa Head finally slips past your guard, but it leaves a nasty gash on John’s thigh as it barrels past him.

Later you will have time to think about how it all could have gone wrong forever right then and there. Later you will remember catching sight of a shipwreck, now high and dry, and wondering how far down you had gone, or how far up it had been drawn. Later you will tell your daughters this story, leaving out how scared John looked, how awkwardly you had to tackle him out of the way to get him to unfreeze and how after that you couldn’t tell at first the difference between his blood and the sort of ever-present pain in your gut that came with fear-sickness, and your own ill-timed bleeding and the pain that always came with that.

Later.

Later.

Now there is not much water left at all. Now, there are things in what is left of the water that can smell blood. You can smell it too, of course. Blood and the sea, blood and sweat, and now Johnny looks so resolute, so handsome, so very like a Belmont that you think this must be falling in love.

Gwendolyn is dead. You are alive.

The golem is somewhere in between.

To bring its head down into striking range is simple enough, the two of you work in concert, shattering it layer by layer. You cannot bring yourself to care that you are bleeding down your legs, not when you are moving constantly, dodging the thing’s blows, dodging the rocks it knocks loose from this lowest chamber’s ceiling. You are a weapon, not a human being, and this is something you are meant to destroy. It is easy to pretend everything is all right, at a time like this. The accursed creature finally breaks down when it is little more than a head on legs, the red gem that powered it shattering and bathing you and John in untamed magic, healing you both, reviving you both from the tattered exhaustion you know could not have been only yours.

Later you will wonder why it was here that you finally made your decision. Later you will think of the sea and of blood and of sweat and wonder what it was that made the scent of all three combined something you didn’t feel sick to breathe in. Later you will wonder what you would have done had things gone differently than they did when you made the decision to act.

Later.

Now is a part of the story you will not tell your daughters. Now is a part of the story he will not tell his son. You are kissing John, now, desperately kissing him, spear forgotten on the rough floor beside you, both hands grasping his suspenders to pull him close. There is a moment of surprise and then his hands are at your waist, and he is kissing back, head tilted back as yours is tilted down, and God, _God_ , he’s the same height as Gwendolyn, how could you not have realized, he’s two inches shorter than you even with the pair of you in boots with heels, there is something so terrible about that - and yet it makes a certain sort of sense, even more terrible -

“We have until dawn,” he says, when he pulls back, panting, leaning back against his suspenders and trusting that you won’t drop him. He looks punch-drunk, but happy. “I mean, the boat won’t be back until….”

“To hell with the boat,” you say decisively, and kiss him again. Most of the night is spent kissing, one way or another, even as you two do manage to make your way back up to the surface, up to a point that won’t become a deathtrap when the residual magic on this place fades away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're lucky enough to not have irregular periods that kick off with cramping that could be mistaken for anxiety-induced stomach pain this is not the place to brag about that. I really, REALLY do not miss my uterus, and may have been giving my past self a little catharsis here. 
> 
> Also I've spent way too long looking at the sprites, and I am now pretty much certain that John actually was the shorter of the two of them. We've all just assumed he wasn't because of how that one bit of the opening was set up....

**Author's Note:**

> The Alucard Spear being called the "Witches' Spear" is a thing in the European manual for VK/Bloodlines/TNG, anyway.


End file.
